Chapter 1, Quick Start to Distributed Computing, reviews the basic concepts of distributed and parallel computing, what it is, why it is required, and how Java supports distributed computing, along with their architecture.

Chapter 2, Communication between Distributed Applications, covers different ways of communicating with remote systems in a distributed architecture, the concept of sockets, and stream programming with examples and URL-based communication.

Chapter 3, RMI, CORBA, and JavaSpace, teaches what the components of message-based systems are and how architectures such as RMI, CORBA, and Java Spaces complement it.

Chapter 4, Enterprise Messaging, explores the concept of enterprise integration patterns and the concepts of synchronous and asynchronous messaging, with technologies such as JMS and web services.

Chapter 5, HPC Cluster Computing, covers handling large amounts of data through parallel or distributed computing using HPC, cluster-computing architecture, and Java support for these implementations.

Chapter 6, Distributed Databases, covers the concepts and ways to set up a distributed database. It also explains how distributed databases help in performance improvisation with distributed transactions and XA transactions with examples.

Chapter 7, Cloud and Distributed Computing, explains how cloud and distributed computing go hand in hand. You will also learn the setup and procedure to configure your applications on market-leading cloud environments.

Chapter 8, Big Data Analytics, discusses big data concepts and how big data helps in distributed computing. The chapter covers the implementations of big data, along with methods and applications, including Hadoop, MapReduce, and HDFS.

Chapter 9, Testing, Debugging, and Troubleshooting, explores how to test, debug, and troubleshoot distributed systems, and the different challenges in distributed computing.

Chapter 10, Security, discusses different security issues and constraints associated with distributed computing and how to address them.

To follow along with this book, you'll need a computer with an internet connection. You can choose to work online on the Cloud Java IDE to practice the examples. I recommend you have the Eclipse IDE with Tomcat/WebLogic container with the respective respective Maven/Gradle dependencies based on the concept you want to practice happily. For concepts such as cloud computing, you should have access to Cloud Foundry to practice.

This book has been tested on people who have decent programming knowledge of Java. They picked up going through the chapters with practice, and in the end, they had a thorough knowledge of distributed computing and the design aspects of distributed computing. In this book, you will learn some tricks and tips that you probably didn't know about, or some wise suggestions that will help you along the way. This book, if followed from cover to cover, will turn you into a proficient distributed system architecture expert. On the other hand, if you already are, it provides a good reference for many different features and techniques that may come in handy from time to time. Finally, this book is also a valid migration guide if you have already experimented with distributed system concepts and you feel overwhelmed by change.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts using the include directive." A block of code is set as follows:

[default]
public static void main(String[] args) { 
  System.out.println(“Distributed computing with Java 9”);       
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

[default]
public static void main(String[] args) {
//Comments for the below statement System.out.println(“Distributed 
  //computing with Java 9”);   
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# cp /usr/src/main/java/distributed/target/Component.class 
     /etc/distributed/classes/Component.class

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In order to download new modules, we will go to Files | Settings | Project Name | Project Interpreter."

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